Wednesday, March 10

Celebrate St. Patrick's Day with a Beer Ice Cream Float

St. Patrick's Day. It's all about meat, 'taters, cabbage, and leprechauns. No wonder this Italian girl from New England has never gotten excited about it. Fortunately, it's also about beer, and that does get me excited.

I'm a late-comer to beer, but I love it; since I live in San Diego, that's a good thing. With a whopping 33 breweries producing craft beer, San Diego was recently crowned the top beer city in the country by Men’s Journal.

I just discovered an amazing seasonal beer called Pipeline Porter. It's brewed by Kona Brewing Company in Hawaii but distributed to only a handful of markets including San Diego. It may just be the perfect beer for a Beer Ice Cream Float.

Made with rich, freshly roasted 100% Hawaiin Kona coffee, Pipeline Porter is a smooth, dark, complex beer with a distinctive espresso flavor. It's delicious on its own, but it's downright decadent when paired with premium coffee ice cream for an authentic Beer Ice Cream Float. If you can't get Pipeline Porter, then substitute another porter or stout with chocolate or espresso notes. Then celebrate St. Patrick's Day, with or without the leprechauns.

Your favored brew is unavailable to us here in South Mississippi, but we DO have something that fits perfectly into your recipe: Lazy Magnolia Brewery's Southern Pecan brown ale. Makes a fantastic float, not unlike your fave, I'll wager.

My husband and I made a drink like this from a recipe found in the seat back magazine on Southwest Airline. It made a milk shake with guiness and vanilla ice cream. It tasted great. The beer taste cut the sweetness of the ice cream.

A few weeks ago, we’d picked up a bottle of Black Boss Porter, which had since been languishing in my fridge. A big, dark, roasty beer that coats the tongue with a wash of coffee, caramel, malt, molasses, and maple syrup, it’s delicious—but not exactly a prime dinner companion. So it waited, and I wondered. And then I got thirsty, as I’ve been known to do—for dessert. Running with a vague recollection of something strange I’d once read in a restaurant review, I took down a drinking glass and my trusty spring-loaded ice cream scoop. I stacked three golf-ball-size scoops of vanilla bean ice cream in the glass, popped open the porter, and poured.